A content analysis of e-cigarette related calls to the Shanghai health hotline, for the period 2014–2019

INTRODUCTION: The health hotline (12320) of Shanghai, not only offers residents information about health knowledge, policies and regulations, but also serves as a channel for public supervision on health issues. This study explored the content of calls towards the Shanghai health hotline (SHH) related to e-cigarettes. METHODS: The call sheets related to e-cigarette received by SHH were collected from 2014 to 2019. Voice conversations were recorded by the management system of SHH and the telephone operators then converted the recordings into text to collect the information of residents. We used a natural language processor, ROST-CM6.0 to clean up and create words dictionaries and analyzed the text using a text-mining method to identify themes and other useful details. RESULTS: Among the 491 call sheets, 87.4% were for consultation and 7.5% for complaint. The issue that Shanghai citizens were concerned about most was ‘whether the e-cigarette belongs to the jurisdictional scope of the Amendment’, and 76.6% of the call sheets were related to this particular concern. Other concerns were ‘whether e-cigarettes are harmful or not’ (9.4%), ‘can e-cigarettes help people quit smoking or have side effects’ (6.1%), ‘whether e-cigarettes can be sold openly in shopping malls and where can we buy e-cigarettes’ (2.2%) and ‘can minors buy e-cigarettes’ (1.0%). CONCLUSIONS: The number of call sheets about e-cigarettes received by SHH has seen a significant increase since the Amendment was implemented with questions primarily focused on ‘if electronic cigarettes belong to the scope of tobacco control’.